What If You Hate Exercise?

I got this e-mail today: “I’m thinking about my New Year’s resolutions and I want to make exercise one of them (not for weight loss, I know that doesn’t work) but because I understand that it’s good for my body. The problem is, I absolutely hate it so I don’t know if doing it fits in with my idea of Health at Every Size. I hear people talk about “joyful moving” but there’s nothing joyful about it for me!”

This is a question I get a lot. First, there is a mistaken notion out there that because I talk about my life as a fathlete, and I talk about what the research says about fitness, that I am “promoting” exercise or I think that people “should” exercise.

Sometimes this happens because I haven’t written things as clearly as I…